9 Advanced and Actionable SEO Tips for Your eCommerce Store

In this post I am going to outline some actionable SEO tips for your eCommerce store. SEO is a big field and by no means is this the complete list of everything you can possible do to improve rankings and traffic. This list assumes you’ve done all the major SEO ground work such as making sure your site is crawl-able, all pages are indexed, mobile friendly and optimised for speed. Everyone knows those tips already and there are tonnes of guides on them available online. These tips are more specific to the e-commerce space and not so broad. We’ve focused on making the tips shown here 100% actionable. No vague concepts here, I’m going to show you exactly how to get more traffic and rankings to your eCommerce store straight away.

Write Click Enticing Title Tags

Often SEO is totally focused on getting rankings. But that’s only half the job, you need to entice people to click on your links. Firstly there is nothing more boring than simply a product listing as your title tag on the page. Add in more descriptive title tags that are relevant to your competitive advantage. Let’s take a couple of examples for the category “wireless routers”:

A boring example would be:

Wireless Routers – My Online Store

A better example would be:

The Best Wireless Routers for Home and Office Use – My Online Store

A good tip here is too look at the copy that ads show on the page. AdWords and PPC marketers focus heavily on optimising for click through rate so it makes sense to copy their strategy as far as title tags go.

Write Better Product Descriptions

Not having fully fledged out product descriptions is a massive mistake. We know that longer content ranks better. Of course you don’t want to stuff a bunch of keywords into all your product pages where it isn’t necessary. But you need to give something for the search engines to crawl. Furthermore adding more content will result in your product being found for more long tail terms. Sometimes knowing what to write can be a challenge. Create a comprehensive list of all the features and benefits of each product and add that to each page. You’ll be sure to see your traffic and rankings increase for these pages on your site.

Send Products to Bloggers for Reviews

OK so this is an old trick but it still works. Find bloggers in your niche and ask them to review your products in exchange for the product. The trick is to find bloggers who are not at the top tear. You want to find local bloggers, mommy bloggers, and mid-list bloggers. The top bloggers are pitched to so often that it’s a better return on effort pitching to mid-level bloggers.

Do Versus Posts

Versus posts on your blog are another great way to get free traffic to your blog on your eCommerce site. These types of posts have moderate purchase intention so can lead to so genuine sales. Often these haven’t been optimised well for so you can easily rank 1 or 2 position. Basically these posts revolve around comparing two similar products of competing brands. Of course this works best if you sell both products you’re comparing. For an example let’s say you sell headphones at your online store. One of the biggest brands would be Beats by Dre. Try writing an article on Beats by Dre vs Sennheiser. But that’s not the only option. You could create a bunch of articles or one long piece comparing Beats by Dre to many alternatives. Simply typing in “Beats by Dre Vs” into Google and Google autocomplete provides the following suggestion for you:

Try typing one of your products into Google and putting “vs” after and see what content suggestions Google provides

Do Product Reviews Posts for New Products

If a new product is in the pipeline do a review. Not only is this an excellent way to gain free traffic to your blog, but if you get in early enough it’s a great way to leverage content for shares and links. Try entering any product into Google and auto suggest often includes review as the next option. To gain links and social mentions from this strategy you must be one of the first to review it. Ask your suppliers if they having any new models coming down the pipeline and ask to get a look before it’s released. Once the review is written find influencers in your niche using Buzzsumo and ask them to share and link to your post.

Create Buyers Guide Articles

OK this tips is good for directing tonnes of traffic to your blog that you can then turn into leads and sales. Think of this as affiliate marketing but done on your site. For this you need to be a larger online retailer that sells a variety of products from different brands.

I know this sounds kind of vague but let’s break it down. Say you are a retailer selling squid jigs. You probably want to rank for terms like “squid jigs for sale online” and “squid jigs online”. Whether you rank for these terms or not it’s irrelevant. But users looking for squid jigs don’t only use those terms. They also use terms such as “different types of squid jigs”, “the best squid jigs brands” or even the “best squid jigs for shore based fishing”. You’ve got a bunch of terms there that you’re going to rank for easily in your blog.

So you create an article around those long tail terms in a buyer’s guide. Take a look at this article on Suzuki 4WD Bull Bars by 4wd Parts Shop Online. This article ranks for a bunch of terms including Suzuki 4wd Bull Bars, Suzuki Sierra Bull Bars, Suzuki Jimny Bull Bars and more. This tactic work well for two reasons: firstly we know longer form content performs better in search. Two with the introduction of the rank brain algorithm having semantically related keywords is becoming a bigger ranking factor. In a buyer’s guide you will naturally include a bunch of related terms that will help your page rank but also attract traffic from those long tail terms.

Add Buy Online To Your Product Page Title Tags

Credit where credits due this tip actually comes from Brendan at Paretto eCommerce. If you’re an eCommerce store you should add the terms “Buy Online” to your product title tags. Why? Because it will get you more qualified traffic. It comes down to the sales funnel. Each time someone searches “product XYZ buy online” you can be pretty sure they have high purchase intention.

Run Promotions for Easy Links, Mentions and Social Shares

Everyone loves a good promotion, so leverage this fact for social shares and links. Whether it’s a heavily discounted item, competition or even a giveaway this can be a great way to get links and social shares. The key is to make the offer enticing. Once the offer is created reach out to influencers, Facebook groups, competitions pages and forums to promote your giveaway.

Use Schema Markup for Product Reviews

This tip is a great for getting more traffic from the same rankings. Using schema markup you can add reviews to each product page. Once set up correctly you will receive a star rating right there on the SERP that will entice clicks away from you competitors.

There you go. There’s a few tips that you can implement straight away to boost traffic to your eCommerce store.